I use Win8 on my touch screen notebook. I don't see Win8 being worse with mouse and keyboard - I use it just as I do with Win7. The only thing that was unusual was the start menu, but I launch applications in the same way as I do on Win7: Tap the Windows key and the first few letters of the application name.
It's much easier to use a tough screen with Win8 than previous version - but I see in no way it impairs my mouse,keyboard use.
This whole "disaster" cry is overrated. It's just a Windows release more different that what people are used to.

Here in Norway it's getting more and more common to have checkout-points where the machine dispenses the money, no human got access to it except the security guard that refills the machine when the time-lock allows it. If you want to rob somebody it better be their gold fillings.

As of version 9, IE isn't that awful any more. I didn't have to do anything special for IE) when it came out - the sites looked like they did in Firefox, Opera Webkit etc - finally using the nice CSS3 features. The design is built on adaptive degrading so the newer the browser the prettier it looks. And it gets even better with IE10. For the most part, IE9+ just works. It's becoming less of a pain. The new pain is the various HTML5. CSS3 support that varies greatly among the whole browser-spectrum. (Though, not surprisingly considering the are note complete.)

Aye. When the bomb went off in Oslo I was in Sweden for a vacation. I started getting odd "Are you OK?" messages from people, even people I don't frequently talk to. I found it very nice to use Facebook to inform the general bulk of my acquaintances who where concerned.
I also found Facebook to be a useful source of finding out of my friends and acquaintances in Oslo was ok - it was quite chaotic and for each person to contact everyone they know - or reply to each request would take a lot of time.
Ditto for the London bombings - then the social websites weren't so widely used, but I found it difficult getting any life-sign from my friends in London because the phone network collapsed. Then it took days before I got replies.
So yes, this is an area where I find social connection websites comes very handy and useful. It's not really more unthinkable to drop a message on a website as oppose to sending texts or phoning.

And to think of that now the monitors are large enough to give each player a decent piece to look at while playing split screen - as oppose to sharing an old 14" 800x600 tiny monitor. You'd think it'd be more of it now ehn it's more practical.

Basically for new writers who write a science fiction time travel story you gotta make sure you mention briefly that you solved the orbit/rotation/surface problem and have calibrated your time machine to account for the ever changing topography of the Earth as well as its orbit and rotation... Or maybe claim that you machine is anchored to Earth's gravity well to simplify things a bit more?

Got to make sure? Why? It's fiction, it's a story, entertainment. If you have to make plausible claims and explaination for every little details it'll be a book that bore you to death.

No - because you never see a website side by side. The only time you choose between a set of websites is when you do a web-search, and then you pick from the text extract summary and it's location in the search results.